NCAA members are visiting the organization's headquarters this week to offer proposals on a new NCAA governance structure. / Brian Spurlock, USA TODAY Sports

by Dan Wolken, USA TODAY Sports

by Dan Wolken, USA TODAY Sports

INDIANAPOLIS â?? As high-ranking college athletics officials gather today and Wednesday to discuss a new governance structure for the NCAA, Div. 1 Board of Directors chairman Nathan Hatch told USA TODAY Sports in an exclusive interview he did not envision the process resulting in a new subdivision for the wealthiest football-playing schools.

"From what I've heard in the association, I think people would like to have one Division I, but in some ways, a structure that will make certain differentiations between small conferences and big conferences," said Hatch, president at Wake Forest University. "I think people like having one division."

Sparked by the recent frustration of schools and conferences, who have watched a number of significant reform proposals die within the bureaucratic process, the NCAA expects to have a new, more nimble structure ready for implementation by next August.

Several groups with an interest in the outcome, including organizations representing coaches, athletes, athletic directors, conference commissioners, compliance directors and faculty, met with the Board of Directors on Tuesday at NCAA headquarters to present ideas for what the new Division I structure should look like.

Hatch's assertion that the 300-plus Division I schools won't be subdivided between those who have big-time football programs and everybody else runs counter to the rhetoric that spread throughout college athletics this summer, as commissioners of the five wealthiest conferences publicly pushed for more autonomy to make their own rules.

But instead of a so-called "Division IV," in which those schools would operate as a separate legislative entity, it appears the Board of Directors favors a system in which a federation of big schools within Division I could make rules that allow them to use more of their resources, while other conferences can choose whether or not to follow suit. As an example, if wealthier schools decided to deregulate how many meals they could feed athletes, smaller-revenue schools in Division I would theoretically be able to operate with the same freedom if they could afford it.

That shift would formalize the growing opinion within the NCAA that its rulebook shouldn't be used to create the illusion of a level playing field.

"There will have to be some give and take as we go down the road, but the fact that all 351 (Division I) athletics directors are speaking out of the same hymnal, it's the first time in my 20 years," said Purdue athletics director Morgan Burke, who represented the 1A Athletics Directors Association at the meeting. "I think we recognize there are unique demands, pressures and resources (on the big schools), so there has to be some autonomy on some select issues, but there's an awful lot of commonality."

The question becomes where those lines get drawn, which set of schools have voting power on which issues and how that results in a smoother legislative process to implement things like the so-called "full cost of attendance" stipend, which got vetoed by the smaller-revenue Division I schools (mostly those without Football Bowl Subdivision programs) in 2011.

Parsing those details may be the most difficult part of the process, but with the NCAA facing numerous legal and public relations challenges to its amateurism model, splitting up Division I based on financial strength might not be the best strategy.

Whatever the result, most of the changes to the NCAA structure are unlikely to be noticed by fans but potentially significant to those directly impacted by the association's voluminous rulebook.

Under the current structure, groups of university presidents have a heavy hand in both creating and adopting NCAA policy, often without much input from the practitioners in athletic departments who have to carry it out. What's likely to result from the reorganization is a presidential Board of Directors that would be "an overarching governance board, not an operational board," Texas Tech faculty athletics representative Brian Shannon said, with a council of "key stakeholders" like athletics directors and faculty representatives underneath it that would play a much bigger role in evaluating proposals from within the NCAA and developing policy on its own.

"There's certain receptivity to that," Shannon said.

There's also a strong desire to untangle the current model where policies are adopted by the Board of Directors and then vetoed by the membership because consensus wasn't built on the front end or unintended consequences were discovered after the fact.

"If we're going to talk scholarships, let's have a financial aid person in the room. If you're going to talk football, let's have a football coach and student-athlete in the room," said Julie Cromer, an executive associate athletics director at Indiana who represented the association of compliance officers. "That's not always happening right now. So the idea hatches, it comes out of a committee that may or may not include people who really are in touch with that issue on campus."

Following this week's meetings and the annual NCAA convention in January, Hatch said he will lead a subcommittee of seven Board of Directors members that will work with NCAA president Mark Emmert to come up with a template for the new governance structure over the next several months.

Asked if Emmert, who has been the target of significant criticism during his tenure over a host of issues, would still be in office to implement the changes, Hatch said, "I fully expect that."

Though all parties said Tuesday's discussion was productive, how to keep Division I together while satisfying the sometimes disparate interests of the group is far from settled.

"That's the kind of thing we're going to wrestle with," Hatch said. "I do think the big conferences have to be granted certain degrees of freedom; their issues are so much different than much smaller institutions that somehow if we're going to have the big tent, one division, we're going to have to take into account that they're very different. There's great unity on certain things like student-athlete welfare, academic standards, those sorts of things, and it's one of the reasons we want to stay together."